Having given up on my old life now, I've finally achieved some kind of equilibrium. It just means I drink in different bars and get to talk to people who haven't suddenly decided to hate me while I was out of the country, but it's better, if not altogether happy.
Friday nights are still hell, and the policemen (it's true about them getting younger by the way) all say 'hello' when I walk by. It makes me feel about 90 - if they'd done that when I was a kid I'd have been panicking inside and running the ever-present list of recent crimes through my mind. Now I'm just pleased to see them, and I guess it shows. The car hasn't been attacked since the last incident reported here, but then again it hasn't spent Friday night here either...
I managed to break (or at least, I think I managed to break) Zend's CVS server just after the weekend began, which effectively means I'm in the twin position of having a lot to do and no way to do it. 'Just enjoy the day,' offered Rick, my direct boss. Hm kay. So what do people actually do with free Saturdays? It's not just Zend - I've never taken weekends in the standard sense, usually because the kind of job I've had hasn't been the kind where weekends are different to any other days. They're very much an office construct. Historically, weekends have generally consisted of Tuesday as far as I'm concerned, which became less interesting when the licensing laws changed to allow all-day opening. Until then it used to be considered pretty wonderful if you could get market day off work - the bars in chartered market towns were allowed to stay open until 4pm on market days - and in Hitchin, where I spent most of my adult life to date, market day fell (and still falls) on a Tuesday.
Happy days :-) learning to play pool with the bikers in the George and strolling home rat-arsed at 4.10pm ('drinking-up time' was extended from 10 minutes to 20 minutes, eventually). Having a weekend on a Tuesday was easily worth having to work a Saturday and Sunday, back then. I actually still prefer it that way now, too.
So it's a Saturday, a rare Saturday when I don't have anything to do (or at least, I don't have any way to do it), and it's even a warm-ish day. The laundry's in, the kitchen's fairly tidy, the meal I'm making later won't take much over 20 minutes, packing for next week's Amsterdam trip (PHP international conference) will take maybe 10 .... I ended up looking at the stuff in the outhouse I've been promising Mum I'll clear out forever.
And then some handwriting leaps out at me from amongst a sheaf of old papers, and it's not my handwriting, it's Floyd's.
Floyd was my very ex-partner, who died suddenly on Hallowe'en 1999, just two weeks after coming out with the 'Millennium Disease' theory - "have you noticed how everybody's falling apart because of the Millennium?" - and roughly 40 years before either of us expected him to do anything so dramatic. There was a spate of sudden deaths around that time (like, 6 of my family, my cat, our dog, and over 30 of my friends) which seemed to prove his theory correct, but it's not hugely comforting to think of that. I think he was talking about marriages at the time...
Anyway there's his stuff; a short story, one of many stories and poems he wrote. I remember this one clearly; he'd actually written it for radio, and played me a recording of it he'd made (he was an excellent performer). And it occurs to me it'd be kinda nice to put it online, because if you google on 'Chron Gen' or 'bb floyd' you don't get the kind of results you would expect to find if his band had been successful after the www reached the average household, and because he didn't live long enough to even see the Internet in action, but I'm sure he'd have published his bits and bobs on it if he had.
So there's my Saturday task.
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